VOLUME is pleased to present Sonolevitation by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand. The evening will begin with a performance by Richard Chartier.

Sonolevitation: A 15 kHz acoustic vibration is vertically reflected at a precise distance from its source, generating a standing wave that levitates leaves of gold. The air between the intonator and the reflector is evenly divided into alternating areas of dynamic acoustic pressure and vacuous anti-nodal pockets. Within these pressureless voids, fluids and solids can be suspended and spun by the surrounding sound fields. An evocation of the weightless, frictionless environment commonly found in outer space is coupled with an extended opto-aural awareness of space-time itself: the floating objects modulate the frequency and amplitude of the standing wave that levitates them, consequently influencing one another’s motion — each part is an inseparable, co-emergent reflection of the whole.

About the Artists

Richard Chartier(b.1971) is a Los Angeles based artist and is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist sound known as both “microsound” and Neo-Modernist. Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself.

Chartier’s critically acclaimed sound works have been published since 1998 on a variety of labels internationally. He has collaborated with noted composer William Basinski, sound artists CoH, Robert Curgenven, Taylor Deupree, and German electronic music pioneer Asmus Tietchens. In installation he has collaborated with multimedia artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, as well as visual artist Linn Meyers.

Chartier’s sound works and installations continue to be exhibited internationally. His work has been exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (US), Sounding Spaces at NTT/ICC (Japan), I Moderni / The Modernsat Castello di Rivoli (Italy), Resynthesis at The Art Institute of Chicago and with the traveling sound exhibit Invisible Cities. His solo and collaborative installations have been shown at the Art Gallery of University of Maryland (US), Media Lab Enschede (Netherlands), Montalvo Arts Center (US), G Fine Art (US), Die Schachtel (Italy), The Contemporary Museum of Baltimore (US), Fusebox (US), and Diapason (US).

Dmitry Gelfand (b.1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (b. 1972, Minsk, Belarus) create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Current findings, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to investigate questions of perception and perpetuity. Such investigations are salient because the scientific picture of the world, which serves as the basis for contemporary thought, still cannot encompass the unrecordable workings of consciousness.

Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, Domnitch and Gelfand’s installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these rarely seen phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they often serve to vastly extend the observer’s sensory envelope. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion.